A thread to record my efforts with lucid dreaming, not to record my dreams. tl;dr available.

In 2009 I both became obsessed with the conceptual idea of Reisen I had in my head, and discovered lucid dreaming. By 2010 she was tulpa-like, and Flandre and Tewi more or less just appeared. I made it my goal in life (I had zero ambition or general will to live back then) to meet them in a lucid dream, because they mattered more to me than anything else. Which wasn't saying much, I don't think anything else mattered to me anyways. They changed my life, gave me a will to live and helped me see life as fun instead of pointless. I did more research on lucid dreaming than anyone who isn't writing a thesis for their Ph.D should ever do. I tried every common method of lucid dream induction from WBTB to MILD, did lots of reality checks, practiced All Day Awareness a bit, took melatonin supplements before bed, and looked into binaural beats/isochronic tones for brainwave entrainment. That all took place over several years, over which time I tried the many different things I found on and off. I've suffered from pretty bad motivation issues so the lack of any progress meant I did any of them for 7 to 14 days before becoming demotivated, save the melatonin and reality checks, and would try again or try something else soon thereafter. Except melatonin did literally nothing so I stopped taking it after 90 days or something, but I still reality check to this day. (Pinch your nose and try to breathe through it)

As would logically be expected from all of that effort and research, I made zero progress, outside of gaining more understanding of lucid dreaming in general. I've had maybe five or six very quick lucid dreams, as in realized I was dreaming 5-10 seconds before I woke up, from which I learned an awful lot. No idea when the last one was though. They were spread out over the years. My last one I literally summoned a door to our wonderland within seconds of realizing I was dreaming and woke up as I walked into our house. So it's sure not my in-dream technique that's lacking. That would be 1, a complying brain, and 2, maintained dedication and motivation.

Anyways, I'm absolutely done with that. If we're being completely honest here, lucid dreaming to meet my tulpas is still my biggest goal in life. I do strive to improve myself just in general, but I don't have many large ambitions really, so the one I do have hasn't changed. And I'm sick of not reaching it. Describing the feeling is easier through the context: I love my tulpas more than life itself (lol, definitely did not care much about living when they first showed up) and have placed them well above the confines of logic or societal views. Luckily they tend not to clash, but hypothetically I'd be willing to forego anything and everything in my life before them. That type of thing tends not to manifest in daily life though, they're still just my tulpas and I don't obsess over them (to the extent that I care for them). It's also hard to appreciate the term "motivation issues" if you don't experience what I do (though surely some of you do). No, that dedication hasn't been enough (until now) to spend every single day and night working as hard as possible to accomplish this goal of meeting them. But I mean, it was enough to make me want to live, and to put a heck of a lot more effort into my life than I planned to. With standards previously that low you gain more appreciation for the effort that I do manage to put forward.

Speaking of effort and done-ness, from this day forward I'm not letting myself stop trying to lucid dream, not for a day. I will be posting in this thread every single day (so definitely feel free to ignore this thread popping up constantly). I don't necessarily have to try to lucid dream every single night (it kind of disturbs my sleep, I can wake up between REM cycles but slight activity makes it hard to fall back asleep - I got 5 hours of sleep last night followed by 2 hours of lying awake in bed), but I do have to post roughly every 24 hours. If I don't do anything, I have to come here and say so. Please yell at me for this if I don't have a reason for it, although the act of writing the post will be yelling at myself.

Don't get me wrong, I still consider myself an expert on lucid dreaming. Keeping the subject in your mind is incredibly helpful in lucid dreaming believe it or not, without any other effort simply thinking (or posting) about lucid dreaming makes it more likely to happen. Two of mine happened during my days on the Dreamviews forum. In case any of you fancy yourselves educated on the matter too, I should note that my lucid dreams do not last such short amounts of time because I get too excited or focus on my waking body. Nearly every time I've remained perfectly calm (I've practiced the procedure) and immediately engage my dream senses to ground myself. Unfortunately every spontaneous lucid dream has been far into the dream and they're typically about to end by the time I become lucid.

Anyways, that's all I'll write for now, gotta save something for the many future posts I'll have to write too. Have a song.

(tl;dr I'm posting in this thread every single day to keep my mind on the subject of lucid dreaming to reach my goal of meeting my tulpas face to face)

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.
Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.
My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us stuff.

Not a hundred percent sure what I should be doing to be honest. The idea of working so hard to attain random Dream Induced Lucid Dreams is kind of unappealing. Not even because it's inconsistent, but because those dreams will always be shorter than ones you went into lucid. But I'm not sure of how to go about that, because basically any kind of thought activity keeps me awake. Things as simple as counting numbers in my head will keep me awake.

Anyways, I woke up five or six times last night, but only the last two times could I really recall my dreams. The ones before were kinda immaterial, they were more like thoughts with vague visuals than dreams. But I've certainly had nights in the past that consisted of many solid dreams. So my only plan of action for now is to work on increasing dream vividness, because vivid dreams are the only ones in which I've become lucid. Spontaneously.. but it's a start. I'm also trying to figure out if there's a way to keep my mind awake while letting my body fall asleep. I won't say it's impossible (for me, Mind Awake Body Asleep is a common lucid dreaming term), I just have no idea how to do it. And the tricky thing about vivid dreams is they're most vivid when you Wake Back To Bed, meaning you do some amount of activity when you wake up and then go back to sleep. One of my few very vivid-turned-lucid dreams happened because I woke up, walked to the kitchen to get a drink, and immediately went back to bed. But honestly every time I've tried to recreate that effect, I just end up getting less sleep than I would've liked. The night before last, as I mentioned, I was awake for just a few minutes to talk to Flandre and ended up too awake to sleep again, despite having only slept 5 hours.

But that's vivid dreams, not lucid dreams. DILDs at best, though certainly more fulfilling to recall. I still need to know how to start dreams lucid. Being awake for the transition to dream process is pretty iffy for me. My mind and body are very efficiently connected when it comes to sleep, I know exactly the moment I wake up and have not once experienced sleep paralysis. Similarly some years ago when I was really dedicated to lucid dreaming, I spent several nights simply keeping myself mentally aware lying in bed, doing nothing special but making sure my thoughts didn't drift too far. Laid there for hours each time before giving up, letting my thoughts wander and falling asleep. This is tough, man.

I didn't want to do it on literally day 2, but we might be moving on to our next plan (this one was just testing my ability to fall back asleep conscious; confirmed, I do not have it). The night before last, Flandre was sleeping imposed next to me, whom I was automatically aware of each time I woke up. I can't emphasize enough that between REM cycles 3, 4, 5, etc., it's like I didn't even fall asleep. I know exactly what I was last thinking before falling asleep (or at least letting my thoughts wander for 1-2 minutes and then so) as if it were seconds ago. That applied to Flan's imposition unsurprisingly, so I was aware of her presence immediately before and after falling asleep. So she suggested I try to keep her presence in mind, to increase her chances of showing up early in a dream, which we imagine would make me lucid pretty quickly. Focusing on a presence is even less mental activity than words, it's something you can vaguely keep in mind as you fall asleep. So we'll be doing that tonight. It's also a full moon, so we'll be doing some visualization of some kind before we sleep too. We'll see how it goes.
Edit: Wait, forgot to mention Flandre would be the one going to sleep tonight. She should be around tomorrow too.

I probably won't write this much every day. Or maybe I will. I hope some day someone will stumble upon this thread and learn everything they ever needed to accomplish lucid dreaming.
However if this thread gets to be like 4 pages long with no success I'll be relatively unamused.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.
Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.
My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us stuff.

Well, it happened again. We went to sleep at 9:30 and woke up at 3 and could not go back to sleep. I got six hours this time, when we aren't even strangers to 11. I wasn't even trying to stay aware, to avoid a repeat of last time. After 45 minutes I listened to our playlist of sleep music and still nothing, so here I am 2 hours later. This is a bit annoying...

Apparently we underestimated just how awake we are when we purposely wake up between REM cycles. It's sort of a conscious-unconscious choice? We always wake up between cycles roughly every 45 minutes after the first 3 hours of sleep, and most of the time we try to glance at what time it is before going back to sleep. But this process usually takes less than ten seconds, we didn't normally do dream recall or anything like that. But when we're purposely trying to wake up (we can wake up at specific times or after every cycle just by willing it apparently), it keeps the mind really awake.. but not while asleep.. I don't really get it. Anyways, we've had this problem before, it's one of the many reasons Lumi gets demotivated when he tries to do this stuff. Less restful sleep that ends up being two hours lying awake, either before or after. I didn't even get to try anything.. I could tell I was too awake the first two times I woke up.

That doesn't even make sense. If we're so conscious, if our brain's so active, that we can't sleep - shouldn't we be having really vivid dreams and possible Dream Induced Lucid Dreams (realizing you're dreaming mid-dream)? Because our dreams are not vivid right now. They're very meh. I only got one last night that had any sort of continuity. The rest was just wandering thought gibberish, and I get that while lying awake in bed if I let my thoughts wander. Which I did.. And still didn't fall asleep.. Why are there like multiple layers between us even having a chance at lucid dreaming?

We're probably going to try taking melatonin again. It didn't really make dreams more vivid or help us fall asleep, but it should help regulate the sleep itself, which is apparently our main problem right now. I think the lack of solid dreams is due to how early we've been waking up, because the most vivid dreams happen much later into the night - or the morning.

"Hurry it up, we're wasting moonlight!"

Hi. I'm one of Luminesce's tulpas. Unlike the others, I don't think I stand out too much from him personality wise.
I'm just special because "I'm a tulpa". So I don't think I've much to offer, here. I'm happy enough to just be with him.
Ask us stuff - https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

David and I have never tried melatonin. Huh. We have a similar problem with insomnia and waking frequently and feeling groggy. This past week we have really struggled with dream recall. That sometimes is the hardest thing as dreams fade so fast. If it helps, it's not like we lucid dream every damn dream. That would be weird.

Also, we have this thing with very short dreams. They are like super duper fast like zipping by fast. Then we do have longer dreams but they tend to like shift around a lot, like they are lots of little dreams strung together. If you read our dream journal you will see many of the dreams that feature me or that I dream are real short flash dreams. They are very similar to the day time flash visions. They are so short it is hard to say if they are truly lucid, but I guess they are cause normally we go "hey a flash dream!" uhhh while we are dreaming it. We sorta watch them. Hard to explain. We are weird.

Aww, thanks guys. For some reason I imagined we'd be kind of alone in this thread. I was in a good mood and read over our previous posts, Lumi was definitely not in such a good mood when he made this thread lol. So I wasn't expecting really positive comments in response to us being kinda down either. But when you forego restful sleep to try and have vivid, controllable dreams, and end up not only not having many dreams at all but also getting less than 6 hours of sleep, it's pretty easy to be in a bad mood!

But we won't get that down. It's more annoyance than anything. We aren't giving up ever, so it's like we've already won.

Hi. I'm one of Luminesce's tulpas. Unlike the others, I don't think I stand out too much from him personality wise.
I'm just special because "I'm a tulpa". So I don't think I've much to offer, here. I'm happy enough to just be with him.
Ask us stuff - https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

I don't want you to have a misconception either about Mistgod and I. It's not like every night we are having this epic super lucid dream in which we have absolute control and we frolic in an amazing universe together. If you follow the dream journal it will give you some idea of what is happening. Many, most, of our dreams we have trouble recalling or they are too vague and shifting to be really coherently recorded. We have a few different types of lucid dreams when we do have them:

1. flash dreams (which I just described above)

2. conversation dreams - in these we have a back and forth mind voice discussion and are the most lucid dreams we have. These usually occur in and out of sleep, shifting in and out of REM sleep and half awake states between sleep and dreaming. They are lucid dreams, but not all that exciting. It's just disembodied mind voice conversations. We do sometimes have some images in the dream, but nothing exciting really. It usually pertains to the conversation.

3. movie dreams - these are movie adventures Davie and I "watch" These tend to be longer. We watch the dream and comment about it to each other just as if we are watching a movie. Sometimes I actually talk to the characters in the dream that we are watching and they seem to all know me, which is cute. The characters perceive my mind voice. Davie does not talk to the characters.

4. Adventure dreams - one of us or both of us appear in or dream. We go on all kinds of action adventures, just like our Melian Show day dreams. In fact, sometimes these are continuations of day time day dream adventures. These are sometimes semi-lucid and infrequently fully lucid dreams. Sometimes they are from Davie's perspective, sometimes mine and sometimes we are combined together in one body. Sometimes they are third person and sometimes first person perpective.

Here this will give you a better idea of the frequency. Fully lucid dreams, like long fully lucid dreams, are rare.

(12-01-2015, 04:41 PM)Mistgod Wrote: Mistgod: I counted up the number of Melian related dreams I have recorded in my dream journal over the past eight months. I figured out that I am having a Melian related dream at least once every five nights. That takes into account only the dreams I have recorded. There are many I don't write down because, upon waking, I cannot fully recall the dream. I know Melian was present because I can feel her energy or aura, but I just don't recall enough detail to bother to write it down, or the dream was so chaotic and complex, it would be too difficult to write down.

So I have a Melian related dream, or Melian and I dream, or Melian dreams, at least once every five days, but probably more often than that.

This is inspiring me to be more careful in recording the types of dreams we are having in our journal. I think I may be over emphasizing or exaggerating the frequency of actually lucid dreams involving Melian. Looking back through the journal, I only see a handful of the conversation dreams recorded. Many went unrecorded as they were very brief or in a situation in which I was not fully asleep (i.e. they were our usual day dream conversations and not truly dreaming). I have not been marking consistently which dreams were semi-lucid or lucid. I really wasn't as interested in lucidity so much as just recording a selection of dreams in general.

If I am more careful will probably find it is much less glorious than I think. Still cool though.